I’m a longtime fan of message billboards and other roadside rhetoric.
Nowadays I don’t get out to see them as much. But this week, the net brought a batch of striking new ones to me, from exotic Nebraska, mystic New Mexico,, And I couldn’t wait to share them.
After all, they cover some of my favorite topics: Freedom. Choice. Multiculturalism. Fighting hate. Theology, especially the liberal kind. Chutzpah. Calls to action.
And — what better to start with, to bring many of them together?
Bacon.
October is Visitation & Board meeting month for Friends United Meeting (FUM). Besides board members from FUM’s shrinking but scattered territories, notable Friends will be gathering in and around its home turf of Richmond Indiana.
Among the most notable of these visitors is Kenyan Friend John Muhanji, who heads FUM’s African ministries. Besides official sessions, he’ll be visiting several Friends meetings & churches in the Midwest during the next few weeks.
No doubt the official agendas in these sessions will be full, and discussions lively. But if FUM’s record is any guide, some issues may have a hard time getting heard.
One in particular (unless I miss my guess), despite the fact it’s been in the news, on my mind, and even the pope has talked about it. But neither the pope nor I will be in Indiana this month.
So maybe some reader will pass along the following questions, not only in Indiana but to any other FUM-connected meeting or concerned Quakers:
Also . . .
Also, about the gospel being preached . . .
One for all those with financial responsibilities:
Others are asking too:
In Closing: For John Muhanji & FUM:
Fate played a cruel, unwanted hand in Diane Feinstein’s political rise:
On Nov. 27, 1978, at the end of her tether, Ms. Feinstein [then a member of the San Francisco city Board of Supervisors] told City Hall reporters that she intended to quit political life. Two hours later, shots exploded down the hall from her office. She ran toward the gunfire and, moments later, knelt beside a dying mayor. Mr. Moscone and Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay supervisor, who was shot in another office, had been killed by Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor, who was quickly captured and eventually imprisoned.
The Board of Supervisors selected Feinstein to succeed the slain Moscone and from the mayoralty, Feinstein won a U. S. Senate seat in 1992. Continue reading Two Unforgettable Recollections of Senator Dianne Feinstein
NBC NEWS EXCLUSIVE — CAPITOL RIOT
WASHINGTON — One week before Election Day 2020 and just over two months before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an internal FBI analysis concluded that domestic violent extremists were “very willing to take action” in response to a disputed election but that “law enforcement preemption” and the “disorganization” of extremist groups “likely would hinder widespread violence.”
The so-called red cell report — the type of exercise that became widespread after the federal government’s Sept. 11 intelligence failures and are meant to challenge conventional wisdom and encourage outside-the-box thinking — was titled “Alternative Analysis: Potential Scenarios for Reactions of Domestic Violent Extremists to a Disputed 2020 US Presidential Election.” NBC News obtained a redacted copy of the report through a Freedom of Information Act request.
From Reading Religion:
266 Pages — $32.95
Michael Ayers Trotti’s The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South opens with a short transcription of a newspaper article about an Atlanta hanging. The report is about the 1891 execution of Frank Danforth, a Black man who had been convicted of the murder of his wife. The report mentions preachers saying prayers and singing, Danforth swaying to religious music, his repeated testimony to his belief in his own salvation, and white women who stood on a jailhouse fence to watch his execution. Trotti observes that the report describes Danforth’s execution as private because it was done behind jailhouse walls, even though hundreds of people were in attendance.